Excerpted from Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: the Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
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Excerpted from Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Reprinted with permission from Palgrave Macmillan (http://www.palgrave.com/). 1 The Rise of Global and Transnational History Abstract: This chapter outlines the “historiographic revolution” since the 1990s, with a focus on the rise of global history and transnational history. Prior to the late 1980s and the early 1990s, historical writings had been presented primarily in the framework of nations or regions: American history, European history, and the like. During the last 20 years or so, a more global approach has become influential, along with a stress on transnational actors (e.g. races, non- state organizations) and themes (e.g. migrations, human rights). I pay particular attention to international history, traditionally conceptualized as a study of interrelationships among states, which has been increasingly put in the context of, or in juxtaposition with, transnational history. Iriye, Akira. Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833. DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833 1 2 Global and Transnational History There has been a sea change in the way historians understand, teach, and write history during the last 25 years or so. This may be more a personal observation of a historian who has been reading and writing on subjects and themes in modern history, focusing on international affairs, than a widely applicable generalization. But all historians, like scholars of other disciplines, have an obligation to relate their work to that of those who have preceded them and to locate themselves in the past, present, and possible future of their fields. As someone who has been studying his- tory since the 1950s, I feel I have personally witnessed and been involved in some of the historiographic changes during the last six decades. The recent historiographic transformation is evident in the frequency with which words like “global” and “transnational” have come to be used as part of titles of books and articles. Prior to the 1990s, few historical publications, if any, had made use of such adjectives, whereas they have since become common place. Such a phenomenon seems to reflect a sig- nificant new development in the way in which historians conceptualize and seek to understand the past, especially in the modern period. Modern history till recently used to be studied in terms of the nation- state as the key framework of analysis. The scholarly discipline of history, after all, began in nineteenth-century Europe, when the nation-state emerged as the key unit of human activities, political, economic, social, and at times even cultural. History was a study of how a nation emerged and developed. Political, constitutional, and legal issues were examined in close detail, but at the same time, people’s lives, activities, and dreams were considered a vital part of the national past for, as Hegel asserted, there was no such thing as history apart from national consciousness. Such an approach to history spread to countries and people outside the West as they, too, developed as modern states and engaged in nation- building tasks. As an undergraduate (at Haverford College, Pennsylvania), I con- centrated on British history, studying in close detail the constitutional developments under the Tudors and Stuarts and writing a senior thesis on the Anglican clergy in eighteenth-century England. In retrospect this was essential training for a would-be historian. I learned such basics as the reading of primary sources, the review of the scholarly literature, and the writing of a monograph that might potentially be considered for publication. Above all, my principal teacher (Wallace MacCaffrey) taught me and my fellow students that the study of British (or, by extension, any country’s) history was an open book regardless of one’s personal DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 3 background. There were methodologies and generalizations avail- able to all students and applicable to all countries. This was particularly encouraging advice to a foreign student like me, whose command of the English language was less than satisfactory. Having thus been initiated into the world of history study, I went on to graduate school, at Harvard University, where I was trained to become a professional historian. My field of specialization switched from British history to US history as well as to modern Chinese history, but there was no significant change in methodology or approach in the transition. History, in particular mod- ern history that my fellow graduate students and I studied, still consisted of national histories. In each national history, themes like political unifi- cation, constitutional and legal developments, economic modernization, and cultural pursuits (including religion, education, and popular enter- tainment) were subjects of research, writing, and teaching, all pointing to the emergence of the nation as it came to exist at a given moment in time as well as to its subsequent development. Such a perspective may be termed nation-centrism, or the nation-centered understanding of modern history. Inevitably, the nation-centered historical study tended to accentuate the uniqueness of each country’s experiences, ideas, and institutions. A country’s past was a precious heritage passed on from generation to generation and constituted the shared memory of all its citizens. The historian’s task in such a context, we learned, appeared to consist of exploring that heritage in all its nuances and then to pass it on to readers. “Exceptionalism” was thus a tendency that frequently charac- terized the way any nation’s past was studied and understood. Of course, as would-be scholars of history, we learned that a rich his- toriographic tradition existed so that one generation of historians would not just repeat what their predecessors had accomplished. A professional historian’s task was to make an “original contribution” to the scholarly literature, such as adding new data, a fresh methodology, or even a con- troversial perspective on a country’s past. For those of our generation who were trained as historians during the 1950s and the early 1960s, several fascinating shifts would occur in the study of the past, albeit still within the larger framework of national history. In the case of Chinese history, for instance, for a long time the country’s “response” (or lack of response) to the West was a standard framework for understanding its modern experience, but then some scholars began to emphasize China’s indigenous ideas and institutions that had prepared it for its modern nationhood. The focus on the nation DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833 4 Global and Transnational History as the unit of analysis remained, however. In US history, political devel- opments interested most professional historians till the 1960s when a “social turn” emerged, with scholars emphasizing the need to pay closer attention than in the past to women, racial minorities, and others who had not been the primary actors in the political drama. Social historians were eager to bring these outsiders into their study of the American past. Women’s history, African-American history, ethnic history, and the like were among the most interesting subfields of history in the last decades of the twentieth century. Rather than focusing on the “establishment,” the new turn sought to incorporate the disenfranchised, the minorities, and the marginalized as authentic actors in the reconceptualized history of the American nation. This was still nation-centered history, but with a greater emphasis on the country’s social groups and local scenes than on national politics. But the “social turn,” if anything, accentuated the exceptionalist interpretation of the nation’s past. For, to the extent that social history encouraged scholars and students to examine the nation’s history “from the bottom up,” as it was said, minute details and local developments came to claim their attention as much as, or even more than, broader themes and larger questions. The attention paid to local history was an important corrective to nation-centered generalizations, but it could also keep the historian’s attention narrowly focused. If the larger national picture was sometimes lost sight of, even more so were other countries, not to mention the whole world. Without some exami- nation and knowledge of concurrent developments elsewhere, it was easy to dwell on the local scene and emphasize its uniqueness. Cultural studies that gained influence simultaneously with social history may have accentuated this tendency through its emphasis on the text, i.e. the authenticity of the spoken or written word grounded on each individual circumstance. It was very difficult to generalize about written texts or works of art because circumstances of their creation were all different. At the same time, the “cultural turn” often implied a shift away from the study of elites (in the history of art, of literature, of music, and the like) toward a concern with mass consumption and popular culture. These phenomena, too, were seen as unique, both to the local scene and to the nation at large, reflective of national habits of mind, or “mentalities.” Needless to say, neither in their research nor in teaching, could histo- rians just deal with one country and entirely ignore other countries or the wider world. A small number of scholars compared such phenomena as feudalism and nationalism across national boundaries. This was what DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 5 came to be called comparative history. However, unlike comparative literature that grew in a very short period of time (mostly in the sec- ond half of the twentieth century) into a major field, often with its own separate department, comparative history was not practiced widely and often consisted of scholars of different nations’ histories comparing their notes, so that their nation-centrism remained.